How to Measure the Pixel Limit on Page Titles & Descriptions

Pop quiz: when you’re creating a title for a blog post or other page on your website, how many characters should it be?

I’ll give you a hint: this is a trick question.

Stumped?

Here’s the truth: character count is variable. You can aim for a given target, but Google doesn’t actually limit by character. They limit by space. This is pretty meaningful, depending on what you’re typing in your title. Different letters take up different amounts of space, I versus M, for example.

Common advice across many SEO blogs is that a title should be around 60 characters long. But consider that 60 “I” characters is only 291 pixels in Google’s SERPs; it only takes 32 “m” characters to reach the maximum space allotted before being truncated.

Obviously, your page title isn’t going to be all Ms or all Is; it’s going to be a mix of letters, numbers, symbols, and possibly even emojis. How do you navigate this situation?

Generally, you have three options.

• The first is to spend time measuring your titles and finding the optimal title length for any given post, to make sure it doesn’t end up truncated.
• The second is to intentionally go over with full knowledge that your title will be truncated, but ensure it happens by appending your brand name to the end of each page so nothing meaningful is lost.
• The third is to undercut your page titles by a significant enough margin that you never run into the risk of truncation.

How do you tell which is which? Where do you draw the line? How can you make such measurements? Which is the better option? What does Google say? Does any of this apply to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any other search engine?

Let’s talk about titles!

Google’s Guidance

As usual, when we’re discussing something about Google search, the first place to check is the source itself. What does Google have to say about title tags?

Well, they say a lot, but not what you might expect. Here’s their page in the Google Developers hub.

I’ve distilled it down to a few bullet points here.

• Make sure every page has a specified title tag.
• Be “descriptive and concise.”
• There’s “no limit on how long a <title> element can be,” but the title link “is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.”
• Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Avoid boilerplate titles that make it impossible to distinguish between pages by title alone.
• Brand your titles concisely. Google actually seems to recommend having a short brand name in your title.

Most of this is common knowledge by now. Only the last one was a bit surprising to me, so let’s analyze it a bit deeper. Here’s the full section of what Google says about it:

“Brand your titles concisely. The <title> element on your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site. For example:

<title>ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle</title>

But displaying that text in the <title> element of every single page on your site will look repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. In this case, consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each <title> element, separated from the rest of the text with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this:

<title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.</title>”

I know a lot of brands – myself included – who don’t put a brand name in the title. Some avoid it because of the boilerplate recommendation above, but others (like myself) do it to avoid having our titles truncated.

For example, the title of the post you’re reading now is not truncated in Google’s search results, but if I were to add ” – Topicfinder” to the end of it, it definitely would be. So, effectively, the display difference between having the brand name and not is:

• How to Measure the Pixel Limit on Page Titles & Descriptions
• How to Measure the Pixel Limit on Page Titles & Descriptions…

While it’s fine for shorter titles, it’s not meaningful for a longer title. More importantly, if I put Topicfinder at the start of the title, as Google’s example shows, it would be:

• Topicfinder – How to Measure the Pixel Limit on Page Titles & …

At the same time, it’s worth remembering that Google’s search results aren’t just titles, URLs, and descriptions anymore. They have an icon for your logo and your brand name at the top as well. I don’t need to include my brand name in the blog post title because it’s already above the blog post title.

So, here’s my answer to at least one question: you don’t need your brand name in a page title. Google’s advice seems phrased as a recommendation, but I honestly think there are two things at play here. First, Google’s documentation center hasn’t updated since they added brand names to SERPs displays, and second, it’s more of an “if you’re going to, do it this way” rather than a “you should do this” recommendation.

As far as title length goes, Google’s information here is clear and concise. Keep it short because longer titles are truncated according to available space.

How to Analyze the Space a Title Takes Up

Unfortunately, it can be a little difficult to estimate exactly how much space a title will take up. I can tell you it’s about 560 pixels, but how does that translate into letters and words?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do this. That’s why SEO advice isn’t to aim for a given number of pixels, it’s to aim for a certain number of characters, under the assumption that staying within that range will average out to being good enough.

That’s why a bunch of different SEO firms have made free tools to create a simulated SERPs result.

Here are two examples:

• Moz’s tool
• To The Web’s tool

Moz’s isn’t a dynamic as-you-type preview, so it’s slightly harder to use appropriately. To The Web’s tool has a slightly longer display limit than I find Google actually uses, so I find it very slightly inaccurate. Obviously this is also just two of the many available tools, so you can always find whichever one you like the best.

The truth, though, is that even Google’s pixel limit is variable, especially when you consider mobile device viewports. Different mobile devices allow different amounts of space for a webpage, and the smaller the viewport, the more likely a title is to be truncated.

Can Google Change Your Title?

In a blog post I wrote elsewhere a few years ago, I did a bunch of data scraping to analyze whether or not your meta-description tags mattered. What I found was that around 2/3rds of the time, Google just made their own meta-description based on page content tailored to the query. Consequently, many websites either had the meta tags they specified ignored or just didn’t bother to specify their own, knowing that Google would make something up anyway.

Can Google do the same thing with your page title?

The answer is yes, but they’re a lot more limited with it. The same Google developers page I linked above has a list of the ways they feel free to adjust and change your title away from what you specify.

The short version is:

• If your title is supposed to have dynamic content but doesn’t, so it ends up only having the “- brand name” section, they’ll auto-fill something relevant from the page, like a product name or an H1.
• If the title hasn’t changed but the content has, such as a page updating to “best X for 2024” when the page title is still “best X for 2023”, they’ll update the title to match, assuming you just forgot.
• If your title has a bunch of keywords in it but most of them aren’t relevant to the page content, they’ll potentially remove some and pare it down to be more useful.
• If there’s a significant disconnect between page content and title, such as a page content in Chinese but a title in English, they may change the title to be in Chinese to better match.
• When your site name already appears in search results, they may remove the site name from the title.

This last one is most interesting to me because, since the site name is now prominent in search results as its own element, it means there’s no reason to put your site name in your page title except on significant pages like your homepage and About page.

Other Forms of Page Title to Consider

While I’ve considered solely Google’s SERPs title read here, there are actually a few other ways your page title can be displayed that you may want to consider.

Other Search Engines

Google may still have 90% of the search market share, but as time goes on, more and more people are choosing alternatives, either partially or consistently. Bing recommends 65 characters in length, but they can also truncate if they feel like it.

Yahoo uses Bing’s results, so it’s the same there. DuckDuckGo also claims 65 characters or less. Truthfully, though, as long as you’re within limits for Google, you’ll be within limits for the others. You can always spot-check as well, but I have not yet found a tool that generates previews for those search engines the way the tools linked above do for Google. Let me know if you know of one!

Embeds in Chat Programs

When you paste a link to a website into a chat program like Slack, Discord, Skype, or Teams, the program will fetch an embedded preview. This will have your page title visible in the preview, often along with an image and description.

Truthfully, I don’t think I’ve seen any of these cut off any earlier than Google. They can still truncate longer titles, but often, it’s a bit more space than what Google allows, so you’re unlikely to have a problem.

Social Media Embeds

Social media, like Facebook, Twitter (X), and others, all have their own ways to embed page information.

A lot of them use Facebook’s Open Graph protocol, which is another set of metadata you can specify but will simulate it if that information doesn’t exist. You can read more about the open graph here. Notably, you don’t need to specify an open graph title if you’re fine with your as-is page title working, as it uses it as a simple fallback.

Browser Tab Titles

Your browser tabs also display a page title. But since a tab generally only has a very, very limited amount of space, you’re never going to get more than a couple of words there. Frankly, I wouldn’t worry about it.

What’s the Best Option for Page Titles in Google SERPs?

The general SEO recommendation to keep your page title between 40 and 60 characters is good enough for most purposes. Depending on the letters in use, you can be truncated as early as 30-something characters, or as late as something around 110 for nothing but a string of iiiiiis. Using a preview tool like one of the ones I liked above will get you in the right ballpark if you want to make the best possible use of your title space.

I also highly recommend scoping out what kinds of topics and titles are being used for the content you’re competing with. That’s one thing you can do with Topicfinder! Since the Topicfinder output is based on scraped actual content from competitors, it’s a great way to get an idea of the length of topics in use throughout your industry and across your competition. You can then figure out if most people are overdoing it, ignoring character limits, or playing it safe, and where you can fall to stand out amongst the crowd.

Personally, I usually prefer to maximize my available space so I can work with more organic keywords and keep the title as relevant and useful as possible. What do you prefer? Let me know in the comments.

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